


take your silver spoon and dig your grave

by NicoleAnell



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-31
Updated: 2009-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-06 02:04:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NicoleAnell/pseuds/NicoleAnell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The mutiny takes a different turn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	take your silver spoon and dig your grave

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my "fics I'd never write" meme -- prompt was a fic where Baltar dies.

The mutiny, revolution, whatever name it's given itself, is at an impasse. They're already operating as if their power is a given, tossing around titles like "President" and "Commander", but there are too many loose ends. Gaius says, "This feels like New Caprica," to anybody who might be listening on their side -- which Laura is still insisting is the true Colonial Fleet, but is in fact a Cylon baseship and a handful of frightened allies. The first offer comes through to exchange the humans on their ship for the Cylons on Galactica, and Laura says stiffly she won't make a deal with terrorists, although her body seems to go numb realizing she wasn't the one they were asking.

No one argues with her, though. The Twos and Sixes wring their hands and pray for guidance. Gaius' groupie of the moment -- she's told him her name is Lida, and seemed uncharacteristically insistent that he know this -- looks ready to comfort the president just as easily. Tory seems to have decided, privately in her own mind, who she cares more about having on this ship. Who might already be dead, who's already chosen the risk of staying where they didn't belong. She says they ought to jump.

When the second offer comes through -- the one that subtracts Laura and what's left of the Final Five from the equation and only demands one of them, and the weapons disarmed, for the sake of young Hera and whatever sacred, special life Caprica-Six is carrying -- Gaius doesn't know if it's revenge or mercy. In a flash of righteousness he tells Felix say the words, out loud, that he is threatening harm to a three-year-old girl, and Felix waffles and cuts communication instead, at which point the over-anxious Cylons demand that Gaius go sit in another room with Lida and not be put on the phone again, ever. Whoever comes back on the line, apparently, is more confident in declaring the Six with the unborn demon inside her will be in the next airlock whether there's a ship waiting for her or not.

***

_There is a ship waiting for them. She doesn't understand until later, when she is furious they didn't give her a choice. (This is irrational; her choice would've been the same. Maybe she would've had something to say to Gaius, instead of just looking at him with a mixture of confusion and -- this hurt her to remember -- bitterness, but her choice would've been the same.) In the raptor, Sharon plants herself in a corner and won't let any of the Cylons come near her or her daughter. Helo will be tried as an officer, and Caprica understands what that means because Sharon is clutching the pins from his uniform, so Hera won't lose them. Her baby's father is dead._

_She doesn't have Saul's pins. Jealousy is a sin._

***

Gaius drums his fingers on his knee and declines Lida's offer to rub his shoulders for the second time. "I'll go back," he confesses to her. "I'll- willingly. I want to go."

"You're very brave," Lida whispers, in love, in awe.

"I'm not," he says. Then he thinks better of it and adds, "I suppose in this case, yes." Maybe they will write a novel about him. Maybe she will go to bed with him again as his last act alive.

When they return to the control room, an Eight who looks like Sharon after a long weekend at the spa grabs Leoben's wrist and confers with him in a whisper. After a minute, Leoben says, "You can wear a bomb," and Gaius exhales like someone punched his back. He says, "No. What- why? I can't."

"You're not going over there to negotiate," says Tory. "You know that, right? It's just a suggestion." He realizes Tory has not spoken to him the entire time they've been here, only spoken to Laura, but since Laura is currently rolling her eyes back and quietly longing for a goo tub to drown herself in, maybe she's expanding her horizon again.

"No," he says again, trying not to admit the word 'suicide' is scaring him more than anything else in the unspoken phrase.

"You can be useless, then," the Eight snaps.

"He's not useless," says Lida serenely. "He's very brave."

He tunes them out and wants to ask Tory what the frak he could possibly _do_ to make Laura Roslin acknowledge he's doing the right thing, to look at him with anything besides exhaustion, but she isn't exactly an expert there. He does ask her, minutes later, what she would do. He means with her life, but Tory misunderstands and says, "If it were up to me, you wouldn't have a choice."

He realizes this is what he wants.

***

_On the baseship, some of them remember Gaeta -- they remember his clipped voice and shyness and how efficient he was. There's also a rumor he was on that raptor, the one that left two of their sisters dead. They leave it to Caprica-Six to fill in so many blanks, because at this moment she's the only one from Galactica who's talking._

_After the jump, she does shed some tears, mainly in her anger that she didn't know, as if that would change anything. Whatever Gaius is to her, they stress that he absolutely wanted to sacrifice his life for her. She's convinced this is a lie. Another Six asks her, "Would you rather have it the other way?" She would have once. She did once, in a slightly more theatrical way. But she cannot think of an answer now that won't give her pain, endless pain that can't even teach her anything. "I have a son," she says, the easiest truth to hide behind. The other Six clutches her hands and smiles._

_Caprica has never felt a drive for self-preservation this strong and human. She is alive; she is thrilled and shamed by it. This afternoon she'd overheard the phrase "brig whore" in her presence more than once, the jokes about keeping her around for morale, and she constantly calculated whether losing her own life, losing the baby, would be worth killing as many of them as she could. It never was. There's nothing she can name that's worth as much to her right now._

***

He feels extremely noble and pleased with himself for a good eight minutes on the hangar deck, barely registering anything but Caprica's thin clothes and disdain, Hera's tiny arms around her mother's neck. This is his window of clarity and readiness, before he goes back to changing his mind (38 times, each way) and rewriting the ending in panic and desperation. He can still bargain, still reason with Felix and Tom if he can get to them. His followers will fight for him. His followers will not back down until he is rescued, or until he magnanimously embraces the new political regime and brings order back to the fleet (or until, logically, they are outnumbered and demoralized and he is forced to recant his God under threat of pain, but he is hoping this logic does not reach anyone else on the ship).

It goes quicker than all that. Only a few overzealous members of the coup visit his cell. (He recognizes just the one who lost his son, and worries dimly for Paulla again.) They beat him for a while and break one of his wrists, a minor agony that ends 20 minutes later in front of a firing squad.

Six wears a red and blue uniform and says, "I'm so proud of you."

"I thought you'd be angry," he says. This is a lie. He knew she'd be pleased as peaches, like this was his destiny all along, a bargaining chip to secure the future of God's chosen race. Her pleasure in this makes his body ache.

She tells him to breathe, so he does. The marines stand together in a tight line, and he takes two breaths. Someone says, "Detail ready," and he takes seven shorter breaths and stops looking.

"When you open your eyes," Six tells him, "everything will be different."

"Everything?" he repeats with one last ounce of fear in his throat. She smoothes his hair.

"Everything but me."

The ones on duty last see him with his eyes closed and murmuring. They say he might have been praying, and they aren't exactly wrong.


End file.
